Working on the story about Strong City was a much bigger undertaking than I had originally expected. Jeff Bent provided so much information it took three months to go through it all. On top of hours of interviews and archived web pages, Bent also provided the audio transcripts of his father’s trial. This amounted to several days of audio. Luckily, the folks at www.strongcity2.info, a mirror site of Strong City’s site, took on the enormous task of transcribing the trial in writing. It appears that though the trial transcripts were publicly available, the grand jury transcripts were not. Jeff Bent did provide the grand jury transcripts to the Alibi. These transcripts have not been previously published, as far as I can tell. After quite a bit of work my tech guru brother Erich Jansen has edited out the girls’ names. Here is the first half of the audio where the DA plays the safe room interviews conducted while the girls were in CYFD custody. These interviews were not played for the jury during Bent’s trial. We are working on editing the second half.The audio is long but is interesting for a couple reasons. One, grand jury proceedings are secret. Two, the safe room interviews (an interview done in a closed room with video cameras, the minor and an interviewer) offer glimpses into the girls personalities. And three, the audio gives a better idea of how the whole process works. Also, Healed (L.S.) wrote several emails to the Alibi for this story. Here are the complete emails, with only her full name removed.
Wayne Bent Grand Jury Audio
2 min read
